8 January 2006
Wonders of the Business World
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The famed Last Spike photo, marking the completion of Canada's
transcontinental railway.
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One of the nicest things to happen so far in this young year is the global campaign to name the
"New Seven Wonders of the World," conducted by the Zurich-based New 7 Wonders Foundation.
The original seven wonders were chosen by a jury of one Greek philosopher Philon, more than 2,000 years ago. Only one of Philon's picks
survives, Egypt's Pyramid of Giza. And it made the shortlist of 21 triumphs of human endeavour from which a jury of more than 6 billion
can choose its seven faves, with the winning septet to be unveiled New Year's Day 2007.
Like most rankings, this one is sure to be controversial. Among the 21 finalists is the Kremlin but not the Hermitage, the Sydney Opera
House but not Charles Garnier's Paris opera house, the Empire State Building but not the Chartres Cathedral.
Here are some ideas to get you thinking:
Code of Hammurabi. This is the well-spring of rule by law, over the capricious acts of people left to their own devices,
imposed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi circa 1800 B.C. They're a forerunner of today's regulatory protections that despairing neocons
imagine to be modern invention.
Inscribed on a block of black basalt now in the Louvre, Hammurabi's laws inveigh against shoddy goods, price-gouging,
medical malpractice, perjury, and other ills in an era of cutthroat competition among unscrupulous peddlers, docs, and jurists.
Hammurabi also thought it best that businesspeople put their commitments in writing, a precursor to contract law, and the paper and
email trails of which prosecutors are now so enamored.
Hammurabi was not the sentimental type. He had this to say about a miscreant who violated his Law 7, by purchasing gold, sheep, oxen,
or other goods from a man's son or slave without witnesses or a signed contract: "That man has acted as a thief, and shall be put
to death." No house arrests for Hammurabi.
British Empire. Not always easy to admire, think George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, Gandhi's struggles, or Dieppe. But the Brits
shaped the modern era of global commerce, and rumours of the empire's decline are greatly exaggerated.
For some three centuries, beginning in the late 1500s, British jurisprudence, public governance, and commercial practices were
projected to the 20 percent of the world's land mass under Britain's direct influence, where the brand of individualist rather than
communal enterprise as conceived by John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo & Co. often as not took hold.
English ranks only fourth among world languages, but is the lingua franca of global commerce and the Internet, and is overwhelmingly
the second language of non-English leaders in government, business, law, scientific research, and other influential
spheres.
For Isaac Brock, contemptuous of the rough-hewn Canucks he encountered in his North American assignment when he would
rather have been at Wellington's side in subduing Napoleon, it came naturally to declare: "The richest Inheritance on Earth,
a participation in the name, character, and freedom of Britons."
Brock's jingoism found little favour in many parts of the realm, but British customs travelled extraordinarily well. Quite an
achievement, for a small island nation never able to develop an exportable native cuisine.
Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Where playing the securities market began, in 1785. The Amsterdam traders brought securities into the
mainstream, breaking the monopoly of banking cliques in Paris, Florence, Venice, and other city-states. In doing so, they
vastly broadened the access of entrepreneurs to low-cost capital, fuelling the Industrial Revolution.
Today's proliferating stock exchanges, now numbering about 185, operate in jurisdictions formerly hostile to capitalism (China's
Shenzhen Stock Exchange), in dangerous neighbourhoods (the Iraq Stock Exchange), and in remote locales (the Faroese Securities Market of
the Faroe Islands, allied with the Iceland Stock Exchange, itself serving a population smaller than Scarborough's).
For all the innovations since the 18th century, including electronic trading and ever-more sophisticated regulatory
oversight, Mark Twain's dictum still holds: "October is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The
others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February."
Milan Galleria. Indoor shopping dates at least from the largely covered bazaars of the 10th century, and impressive refinements came
with London's Burlington Arcade (opened in 1819) and the Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island (1828). But the bigger Galleria Vittorio
Emanuelle II (1878) set the current standard of spaciousness, arresting storefronts, soaring atria, and other come-ons.
Together with contemporary improvements in window-dressing, money-back guarantees and easy credit,
climate-controlled one-stop shopping transformed the consumer's "marketing day" from an ordeal with
haggling merchants in often foul-smelling street bazaars into something approaching an entertainment event.
But all movements go too far, as Bertrand Russell noted long before the Ghermezians installed tiny Plexiglas cages for foxes and other
wildlife at the entrances to their gigantic West Edmonton Mall; and Beijing's new Golden Resources Shopping Mall (600,000 square metres)
and the Mall of Arabia in Dubai, opening this year, vied for world's-largest status.
Canadian Pacific Railway. The only transcontinental railway that was an exercise in nation building, helping lay the foundation for a
G-8 economy all out of proportion to Canada's diminutive population.
The Trans-Siberian is longer, the Union Pacific a bit older. But the CPR was the longest railway of its time, a
world-renowned engineering feat undertaken by a nascent country with meagre finances, and built by a single company. (The
CPR's American counterpart was a joint venture of two railways.)
The CPR quickly succeeded as an intended means of settling the Canadian West, by which the nation laid claim to territory still coveted
by Americans. (As late as 1901, then-U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that Western Canada "should lie wholly
within our limits... less for our sake than for the sake of the men who lie along [its river] banks.")
The CPR created an east-west commercial corridor to diminish the southward pull of an immensely larger neighbouring
economy, and fed Central Canadian manufacturers with the prodigious raw materials of the West. The CPR was the first Canadian
megaproject, and set the pattern of corporate welfare and government-private sector partnerships and the scandals that
have sometimes arisen from them that lingers to this day.
The Model T. Henry Ford was a latecomer to the auto age. French inventor Jean-Joseph-Etienne Lenoir patented the first
internal-combustion engine in 1860; German engineer Karl Benz and the German team of engineer Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm
Maybach built their first cars in the mid-1880s. The Duryea brothers, Charles Edgar and James Frank, unveiled the first
American car in 1893.
But with the introduction of his Model T in 1908, erstwhile Michigan farm boy Henry Ford revolutionized industrial production methods.
The Model T was mass-produced on a pioneering assembly line soon adopted by rivals in North America and Europe. The Tin
Lizzy, as it was affectionately nicknamed, was reliable for its time, and cheap liberating North Americans to explore their continent,
sparking demands for better roads.
Henry Ford was one of the modern era's first bosses from hell. ("It is not necessary for people to love each other in order to
work together. Too much good fellowship may indeed be very bad for it may lead one man trying to cover up the faults of another.")
He was a virulent anti-Semite whose reputation derives from the technological innovations and financial genius of unsung
associates.
Just the same, before he became dotty in the 1930s, Ford was a business genius with few rivals. In contrast to feckless GM founder
William Crapo Durant, Ford was blessed with both discipline and expansionary vision. He anticipated the need for innovation in dealer
networks; consumer credit; international expansion (Ford opened a Canadian branch a scant year after founding the parent Ford Motor
Co.); and profit margins finely calibrated to maximize demand yet pull enough cash into the firm to sustain the business.
One of Ford's lesser-known but still valid insights was his low regard for consultants. "If I ever wanted to kill
opposition [rivals] by unfair means, I would endow the opposition with experts," Ford said. "They would have so much good
advice that I could be sure they would do little work."
Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. MITI was a post-World War II model partnership of government and
industry similar in spirit to John A. Macdonald's protectionist National Policy, but much wider in scope. It was instrumental in
transforming a crippled postwar Japan into the world's second-largest economy. MITI did so with protectionist and
interventionist methods that irked free-trade apostles mostly because they worked. Japan won global leadership in a
succession of industries, from consumer electronics to heavy machinery, and from automobiles to escalators, power tools, and outboard
motors.
MITI directed Japanese industries in their capital investment, technological upgrading, and even mergers. It helped them license foreign
technology, arbitrated disputes among businesses and between industry and organized labour, promoted Japanese industry's export prowess
while providing it a protected domestic market, intervened to spare companies threatened with onerous regulatory demands, and
maintained an artificially high exchange rate to assist the nation's emboldened exporters.
By the 1980s, with Japanese firms achieving market supremacy worldwide, Tokyo had weakened MITI rather than risk retaliation that
might jeopardize its access to global markets. Even before that, the maverick Sony Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. began to balk at
MITI's edicts. Both firms bet their future almost entirely on the U.S. market, largely ignoring their protected homeland in Honda's
case, after rejecting MITI's demand that it stick with motorcycles, having chosen the much larger Toyota Motor Corp. and Nissan Motor
Co. as Japan's national champions.
The unjustly excluded. How do you ignore the legacies of the Medicis and Rothschilds, of James Watt, Eli Whitney, Henry Bessemer,
Timothy Eaton, Konosuke Matsushita, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates?
You can't. So send me your list of worthies at dolive@thestar.ca.
And if you want to join me in voting off the New 7 island Germany's schmaltzy Neuschwanstein Castle, a storybook folly that could have
been the work of Walt Disney on acid, phone in your vote to any of these three numbers: +372 7070271, +372 54111732, or +44 870
062 3748.
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